The Single Best (And Easiest) Way to Boost Your Investment Returns

Brokerage firms are fighting to claim the low-cost label. You can do it yourself, without the stress, with these simple moves.

Two financial services firms—Charles Schwab and Wealthfront—duked it out in public last week over whose automated investing service is a better deal. Some may see such sparring as unseemly, but I think it’s great. Such sniping will focus more attention on the surest way to boost returns—cutting investing fees.

In case you missed it, Wealthfront, a “robo-advisor” that uses algorithms to provide very low-cost investment advice, raised a stink last week after Schwab introduced Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, a similar investment service that charges no advisory fee. Wealthfront objected to the ways Schwab earns revenue from Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, including putting a portion of recommended portfolios in “smart beta” ETFs that charge somewhat higher fees than traditional ETFs as well as in cash on which Schwab currently pays a very low rate of return. Schwab defended itself, and lobbed some charges of its own.

1. Focus on fees, but don’t obsess over every basis point. You don’t have to work very hard to reap the benefits of low-cost investing. For example, moving from a portfolio of funds whose expense ratios average, say, 1% a year to a portfolio of index funds or ETFs with average expenses of 0.25% can gain you an extra $40,000 or so over the course of 20 years on an initial investment of $100,000, assuming a 6% annual return before expenses. Could you do even better? Sure. These days you can find some ETFs that charge as little as 0.04%.

But at some point shaving off another few basis points here, another couple there and extrapolating the results decades and decades into the future becomes a “fun with numbers” spreadsheet exercise. So by all means create a portfolio of low-cost index funds or ETFs. But don’t feel that you’re losing out if you don’t have the absolute lowest-cost portfolio around.

2. Don’t fritter your savings away by overpaying elsewhere. While you don’t want to devote your life to squeezing out every extra basis point of fees, you don’t want to let savings unnecessarily slip through your fingers either. For example, if you work with a financial adviser, you typically pay two layers of fees: those on your investments, and the fees you pay to the adviser. Depending on how much that adviser charges, much of the savings you reap by moving from a portfolio of high- to low-cost funds could go into the adviser’s pocket instead of yours.

That’s not to say that an adviser who charges 1% or more a year to invest your money is ripping you off. But you need to look at the total amount you’re paying in fees. And you also have to consider whether the services you’re getting from an adviser (investment selection, allocation advice, rebalancing, budgeting, whatever) are worth the money you’re shelling out, not to mention whether you might get the same services elsewhere at a lower cost.

3. Don’t be awed by “white papers.” If you go to the sites of many robo-advisers, you’ll find white papers and/or methodology statements that quantify in mind-numbing detail how these investing algorithms work and why they supposedly generate better portfolios. Hey, I like modern portfolio theory as much as the next guy, and I certainly believe that there are advantages to asset allocation, rebalancing and harvesting losses in taxable accounts. But I also know that you’ve got to take a lot of this number-crunching with a big ol’ grain of salt. The future may unfold differently than the past, and there’s no assurance that what worked before will work again—or generate comparable results even if it does.

Bottom line: Techniques like mean-variance optimization, rebalancing and tax-loss selling may very well enhance performance over the long run (although I’m skeptical about portfolios that load up on lots of funds and asset classes). But ultimately, the surest way to increase your shot at higher returns and achieving your financial goals is to build a broadly diversified portfolio and keep costs down. And that’s true whether you’re investing on your own or getting help from an adviser, human or not.

There’s Free Money for IRA Rollovers—Here’s How to Invest It

Should you take the money and run? Only if you choose the right low-cost funds.

Back in the day, you could walk into a bank to open a new account and walk out with a free toaster.

Today, you can get anywhere from $50 to $2,500 for rolling over a 401(k) into an Individual Retirement Account, or just by moving an IRA from another financial institution.

But since banks are not in the habit of giving away money, you need to ask: What is the catch?

IRA providers use cash incentives, which are cheaper than advertising or direct mail, to acquire new customers. The latest marketing twist comes from Fidelity Investments, which is offering an “IRA Match” program to new and existing customers who transfer a Roth, traditional or rollover IRA to the company. Rollovers from 401(k)s are not eligible.

Fidelity will match your contributions up to 10% for the first three years that the account is open, although you would have to roll over a whopping $500,000 or more to get that level of match.

For most people, the match will be much smaller. A rollover of $50,000, for example, would qualify for a 1.5% match in each of the next three years. That is worth $260 over three years if you max out your annual contributions at $5,500, or $290 if you are over age 50 and eligible to make additional $1,000 catch-up contributions.

Fidelity is pitching this as the way to encourage higher levels of retirement savings, the way many employers make matching contributions to workers’ 401(k) plans.

“When you look at what really works in the retirement space, you can see that the employer match is a major factor driving participation,” says Lauren Brouhard, Fidelity Investments’ senior vice president for retirement. “We wanted to take an element of what works in the workplace and bring it to the IRA.”

Similar deals abound. For example, Charles Schwab Corp frequently runs promotions offering up to $2,500 for opening a new account, including rollovers from 401(k)s. Ally Bank will pay a $100 bonus for rolling between $25,000 and $50,000, and more for larger rollovers. Just do a Web search for “IRA cash bonus” to see how pervasive the practice has become.

Should you take the money and run? Perhaps, but do not let the cash distract you from more fundamental considerations.

For starters, do not roll funds out of a workplace 401(k) plan into an IRA if it charges higher fees. You should also make sure that the new provider offers the type of retirement investments you are looking for.

If you are rolling over to a mutual fund or brokerage company, the cardinal rule is to make sure your new provider does not earn back the bonus by parking you in high-cost active mutual funds or managed portfolio services.

“It’s a free lunch, but not if you yield to the temptations,” says Mitch Tuchman, managing director of Rebalance IRA, a wealth management firm that offers low-cost IRA portfolio management. “You have to avoid falling prey to the sirens of active management.”

Instead, manage your portfolio yourself by creating a portfolio of inexpensive passive index funds or exchange traded funds, which are available through their providers’ brokerage services.

To illustrate, he suggested a portfolio of four Vanguard ETFs whose fees are each below 20 basis points: Total U.S. Stock Market, Total International stocks, Total Bond Market and Total International Bond.

The Problem With Stock Market Games? They Aren’t Boring Enough

If you think investing is fun, you're probably doing it wrong.

People often say the stock market is a game, but a growing number of companies are taking that literally. A slew of new apps, like Ivstr, Kapitall, and Bux (the latter isn’t yet available in the U.S.), say they can teach you about investing by turning it into a short-term competition, complete with scoreboards and points.

The apps keep everything simple by having users compete to predict whether a stock, or portfolio stocks, will go up or down in the next few hours, days, or weeks. (Ivstr goes up to a year.) A few try and crank up the excitement a little further with head-to-head “battles” against friends and little encouragements like “OMG!” after a player completes a trade. It’s all fake money at first, but Bux and Kapitall let users move on to real dollars.

These ideas all sound kind of fun. But do they really teach what you need to know about investing? Stock market apps tend to center around choosing a group of stocks and trading frequently based on their performance.

The trouble is, you’ll do better with your real-life money if you skip all the trading and just buy and hold a low-cost, diversified fund. Research has shown even hedge funds run by market pros can’t beat the market in the long term. Mutual funds mostly don’t beat the index either. Warren Buffett is currently winning his $1 million bet that an S&P 500 index fund will outperform a fund of hedge funds, net of all fees and expense, over just one decade.

You can actually measure how much investors as group cost themselves by trading. According to the mutual fund research group Morningstar, the average U.S. equity mutual fund earned an annualized 8.2% over the 10 years from 2004 through 2013. But the the typical fund investor (as measured by adjusting for cash flows in and out of funds) earned only 6.5%, thanks to poorly timed fund trades. Its hard to imagine retail stock traders are any better at guessing market trends.

Still, maybe there is something to this whole investing as a game idea. We just need to tweak it a little.

Instead of having users pick stocks and watch the market, you spend the first hour looking for funds with the lowest fees and setting up a scheduled deposit. Then it would close.

The game will let you come back to check your accounts once a year, to rebalance your stock and bond allocations. But each additional viewing would cost 1000 Investo-Points.

Every time you try to trade a stock, the game’s in-app avatar will shake its head at you and ask if you really, really want to do that.

You can compete with friends! Thirty years from now, you’ll all get badges showing your huge balances, which you can post on Facebook. Because there will definitely still be a Facebook.

Okay, I suspect my app will have trouble getting past the first round of venture funding. It’s not exactly the most exciting game in the world. Except for the parts where you get to send your kids to college and retire with a decent nest egg. That part is pretty fun.

The key to lifetime fitness is a powerful core—strong and flexible abdominal and back muscles that help with everything else you do and protect against aches and injuries as you age. In your financial life, your core is your long-term savings, and strengthening it is simple: Settle on the right stock/bond mix, favor index funds to keep costs low, fine-tune your approach periodically, and steer clear of gimmicks such as “nontransparent ETFs” or “hedge funds for small investors”—Wall Street’s equivalent of workout fads like muscle-toning shoes.

Popular Among Subscribers

If you don’t already have a target allocation for your age and risk tolerance, steal one from the pie charts at T. Rowe Price’s Asset Allocation Planner. Or take one minute to fill out Vanguard’s mutual fund recommendation tool. You’ll get a list of Vanguard index funds, but you can use the categories to shop anywhere.

2. Push Yourself When You’re Young

Investors 35 and under seem to be so concerned about a market meltdown that they have almost half their portfolios in cash, a 2014 UBS report found. Being too conservative early on—putting 50% in stocks vs. 80%—reduces the likely value of your portfolio at age 65 by 30%, according to Vanguard research. For starting savers, 90% is a commonly recommended stock stake.

3. Do a U-turn at Retirement

According to Wade Pfau of the American College and Michael Kitces of the Pinnacle Advisory Group, you have a better shot at a secure retirement if you hold lots of stocks when you’re young, lots of bonds at retirement, and then gradually shift back to stocks. Their studies found that starting retirement with 20% to 30% in stocks and raising that by two percentage points a year for 15 years helps your money last, especially if you run into a bear market early on.

4. Be Alert for Hidden Risks

Once you’ve been investing for several years and have multiple accounts, perfecting your investment mix gets trickier. Here’s a simple way to get the full picture of your portfolio.

Dig out statements for all your investment accounts—401(k), IRA, spouse’s 401(k), old 401(k), any brokerage accounts. At Morningstar.com, find “Instant X-Ray” under Portfolio Tools. Enter the ticker symbol of each fund you own, along with the dollar value. (Oops. Your 401(k) has separately managed funds that lack tickers? Use the index fund that’s most similar to your fund’s benchmark.)

Clicking “Show Instant X-Ray” will give you a full analysis, including a detailed stock/bond allocation, a geographic breakdown of your holdings, and your portfolio’s overall dividend yield and price/earnings ratio. Look deeper to see how concentrated you are in cyclical stocks, say, or tech companies—a sign you might not be as diversified as you think or taking risks you didn’t even know about.

5. Don’t Weigh Yourself Every Day

Closely monitoring your progress may help with an actual fitness plan. For financial fitness, it’s better to lay off looking at how you’re doing. A growing body of research finds that well-diversified investors who check their balances infrequently are more likely to end up with bigger portfolios, says Michaela Pagel, a finance professor at Columbia Business School. One reason: Pagel says savers who train themselves not to peek are more likely to invest in stocks. And research by Dalbar finds that investors’ tendency to panic sell in bear markets has cut their average annual returns to 5% over the past 20 years, while the S&P 500 earned 9.2%.

When you have the urge to sell, remind yourself that your time horizon is at least 20 years, says Eric Toya, a financial planner in Redondo Beach, Calif. “Outcome-oriented investors agonize over every up-and-down whim of the market and make poor timing decisions,” he says. “If your process is sound, you don’t need to panic.”

How to Save More for Retirement Without Saving an Extra Cent

Think you can't set aside any more dough than you're already saving? Here's a simple way to grow your nest egg without putting a squeeze on your budget.

If I said you could significantly boost the size of your nest egg without setting aside even a single penny more than you already are and do so without taking on a scintilla of extra investing risk, you’d be skeptical, right? Well, you can. Here’s how.

Actually, there’s an easy way boost your retirement account balances without further squeezing your budget: Stash whatever money you do manage to save in the lowest-cost investments you can find. This simple tactic has the same effect as contributing more to your retirement accounts, making it the financial equivalent of upping your savings rate.

How big a jump in your effective savings rate are we talking about? That depends on how much you cut investment fees and how long you reap the benefits of those lower costs. But over time the increase in your effective savings rate can be quite meaningful, as this example shows.

Let’s say you’re 35, earn $50,000 a year, receive 2% annual raises, and contribute 10% of your salary to a 401(k) that earns a 7% a year before fees. If you shell out 1.5% annually in investment expenses, by the time you’re 65 your 401(k) balance will total just under $465,000.

Reduce your annual investment costs from 1.5% to just 1%—hardly a heroic effort—and you’re looking at a nest egg worth roughly $505,000. To end up with that amount while still paying 1.5% in annual fees, you would have to boost your annual 401(k) contribution to 10.8%. Which means that lowering expenses by a half percentage point in this case is essentially the same as saving nearly a full percentage point more each year, except you don’t have to reduce your spending to do it.

And what if you take an even sharper knife to investing costs?

Well, cutting expenses from 1.5% to 0.5% a year would give our hypothetical 35-year-old a 401(k) balance of just under $550,000 at age 65, or the equivalent of saving 11.8% a year instead of 10%. And if you’re able to really cut investment fees to the bone—say, to 0.25%—that nest egg’s value would balloon to just over $573,000. To reach that size while paying 1.5% annually in investing costs, our 35-year-old would have to contribute 12.3% of pay.

By the way, lowering investment costs can also have a big payoff after you’ve stopped saving and have begun tapping your nest egg for retirement income. For example, a 65 year-old with a $1 million nest egg split equally between stocks and bonds who wants an 80% chance that his savings will sustain him for at least 30 years would have to limit himself to an initial draw (that would subsequently rise with inflation) of just under 3.5%, or a bit less than $35,000, assuming annual expenses of 1.5%.

Of course, the results you get may vary for any number of reasons. For example, if you’re doing most of your saving through a 401(k) and your plan lacks good low-cost investment options, your ability to turn lower expenses into a higher account balance will necessarily be limited. And even if you are able to home in on investments with rock-bottom costs, there’s no guarantee that every dollar of cost savings will translate to an extra dollar in your account.

That said, unless every cent of your savings is locked into an account that offers only high-expense investments, you should be able to get some money into cost-efficient options. At the very least you can steer savings in IRAs and taxable accounts into low-fee index funds and ETFs (some of which charge as little as 0.05%). And while cutting investing costs can’t guarantee a larger nest egg, Morningstar research shows that funds with the lowest expense ratios tend to outperform their higher-fee counterparts.

One final note. While targeting low-expense investment options is certainly an effective and painless way to boost the size of your nest egg, you shouldn’t let low costs do all the work. Indeed, if you focus on low-fee investments and increase your contributions to 401(k)s, IRAs and other retirement accounts, that’s when you’ll see your savings balances really take off.

The Smart Money is Finally Embracing the Right Way to Invest. You Should Too.

Investors turned their backs on traditional mutual funds in 2014 and began relying more heavily on indexing.

Since launching the Vanguard 500 fund in 1975, Vanguard founder Jack Bogle has been preaching the gospel of indexing — a plain-vanilla, low-cost strategy that calls for buying and holding all the stocks in a market and “settling” for average returns. He’s so fervent that his nickname in the industry is St. Jack.

Forty years laters, investors have finally found religion.

In 2014, the Vanguard Group attracted a record $216 billion of new money, largely on the strength of its index offerings and exchange-traded funds. These are funds that can be traded like individual stocks and that almost always track a market index.

Vanguard wasn’t alone. Blackrock, which runs the well-known iShares brand ETFs, attracted more than $100 billion of new money in 2014, a year in which investors both small and large embraced indexing, also known as “passive” investing.

By comparison, actively managed mutual funds — those that are run by traditional stock and bond pickers — saw net redemptions of nearly $13 billion last year, according to the fund tracker Morningstar.

He added: “When the market rallies strong, a lot of active managers tend to lag, maybe because they’re being more conservative, holding more quality stocks, or maybe holding a little bit of a cash — it is common for an active manager to hold some cash. So it’s difficult to keep up with the rising market.”

2) 2014 was a year when many heavy hitters espoused their preference for indexing.
In August, MONEY’s Ian Salisbury reported how the influential pension fund known as Calpers — the California Public Employees’ Retirement System — was openly considering reducing its use of actively managed strategies for its clients.

This came on the heels of a provocative column written by a Morningstar insider questioning whether actively managed strategies had a future. “To cut to the chase,” wrote Morningstar’s John Rekenthaler, “apparently not much.”

And as MONEY’s Pat Regnier pointed out in a fascinating piece on Warren Buffett’s investing approach, the Oracle of Omaha noted in his most recent shareholder letter that his will “leaves instructions for his trustees to invest in an S&P 500 index fund.”

The report, which was published in December, noted that “When it comes to the active versus passive debate, the true measurement of successful active management lies in the ability of a manager or a strategy to deliver above-average returns consistently over multiple periods. Demonstrating the ability to outperform repeatedly is the only proven way to differentiate a manager’s luck from skill.”

Yet according to Aye Soe, S&P’s senior director of global research and design, “relatively few funds can consistently stay at the top.”

Indeed, only 9.84% of U.S. stock funds managed to stay in the top quartile of performance over three consecutive years, according to S&P. This is presumably because over time, the higher fees and trading costs that actively managed funds trigger become too difficult for even the most seasoned managers to overcome.

Even worse, just 1.27% of domestic equity portfolios were able to stay in the top 25% of their peers for five straight years. For those funds that specialize in blue chip stocks, the numbers were even worse. Of the 257 large-cap funds that finished in the top quartile of their peers starting in September 2010, less than half of 1% remained in the top quartile for each of the subsequent 12-month periods through September 2014.

As Soe puts it, this “paints a negative picture regarding the lack of long-term persistence in mutual fund returns.”

4. Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow begins, “The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than your own.” This should be every market commentator’s motto.

5. Blogger Jesse Livermore writes, “My main life lesson from investing: self-interest is the most powerful force on earth, and can get people to embrace and defend almost anything.”

6. As Erik Falkenstein says: “In expert tennis, 80% of the points are won, while in amateur tennis, 80% are lost. The same is true for wrestling, chess, and investing: Beginners should focus on avoiding mistakes, experts on making great moves.”

7. There is a difference between, “He predicted the crash of 2008,” and “He predicted crashes, one of which happened to occur in 2008.” It’s important to know the difference when praising investors.

8. Investor Dean Williams once wrote, “Confidence in a forecast rises with the amount of information that goes into it. But the accuracy of the forecast stays the same.”

10. Only 7% of Americans know stocks rose 32% last year, according to Gallup. One-third believe the market either fell or stayed the same. Everyone is aware when markets fall; bull markets can go unnoticed.

11. Dean Williams once noted that “Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect: It tends to create the inability to accept new ideas.” Some of the world’s best investors have no formal backgrounds in finance — which helps them tremendously.

12. The Financial Times wrote, “In 2008 the three most admired personalities in sport were probably Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius.” The same falls from grace happen in investing. Chose your role models carefully.

13. Investor Ralph Wagoner once explained how markets work, recalled by Bill Bernstein: “He likens the market to an excitable dog on a very long leash in New York City, darting randomly in every direction. The dog’s owner is walking from Columbus Circle, through Central Park, to the Metropolitan Museum. At any one moment, there is no predicting which way the pooch will lurch. But in the long run, you know he’s heading northeast at an average speed of three miles per hour. What is astonishing is that almost all of the market players, big and small, seem to have their eye on the dog, and not the owner.”

14. Investor Nick Murray once said, “Timing the market is a fool’s game, whereas time in the market is your greatest natural advantage.” Remember this the next time you’re compelled to cash out.

15. Bill Seidman once said, “You never know what the American public is going to do, but you know that they will do it all at once.” Change is as rapid as it is unpredictable.

16. Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “the man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.” Same goes in investing.

17. Blogger Jesse Livermore writes,”Most people, whether bull or bear, when they are right, are right for the wrong reason, in my opinion.”

18. Investors anchor to the idea that a fair price for a stock must be more than they paid for it. It’s one of the most common, and dangerous, biases that exists. “People do not get what they want or what they expect from the markets; they get what they deserve,” writes Bill Bonner.

19. Jason Zweig writes, “The advice that sounds the best in the short run is always the most dangerous in the long run.”

20. Billionaire investor Ray Dalio once said, “The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you’ll be.” Repeat this line to yourself the next time you’re certain of something.

21. During recessions, elections, and Federal Reserve policy meetings, people become unshakably certain about things they know very little about.

22. “Buy and hold only works if you do both when markets crash. It’s much easier to both buy and hold when markets are rising,” says Ben Carlson.

23. Several studies have shown that people prefer a pundit who is confident to one who is accurate. Pundits are happy to oblige.

24. According to J.P. Morgan, 40% of stocks have suffered “catastrophic losses” since 1980, meaning they fell at least 70% and never recovered.

25. John Reed once wrote, “When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles — generally three to twelve of them — that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.” Keep that in mind when getting frustrated over complicated financial formulas.

26. James Grant says, “Successful investing is about having people agree with you … later.”

27. Scott Adams writes, “A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.”

28. According to Vanguard, 72% of mutual funds benchmarked to the S&P 500 underperformed the index over a 20-year period ending in 2010. The phrase “professional investor” is a loose one.

29. “If your investment horizon is long enough and your position sizing is appropriate, you simply don’t argue with idiocy, you bet against it,” writes Bruce Chadwick.

30. The phrase “double-dip recession” was mentioned 10.8 million times in 2010 and 2011, according to Google. It never came. There were virtually no mentions of “financial collapse” in 2006 and 2007. It did come. A similar story can be told virtually every year.

31. According to Bloomberg, the 50 stocks in the S&P 500 that Wall Street rated the lowest at the end of 2011 outperformed the overall index by 7 percentage points over the following year.

32. “The big money is not in the buying or the selling, but in the sitting,” said Jesse Livermore.

33. Investors want to believe in someone. Forecasters want to earn a living. One of those groups is going to be disappointed. I think you know which.

34. In a poll of 1,000 American adults, asked, “How many millions are in a trillion?” 79% gave an incorrect answer or didn’t know. Keep this in mind when debating large financial problems.

35. As last year’s Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, Warren Buffett said he has owned 400 to 500 stocks during his career, and made most of his money on 10 of them. This is common: a large portion of investing success often comes from a tiny proportion of investments.

37. The S&P 500 gained 27% in 2009 — a phenomenal year. Yet 66% of investors thought it fell that year, according to a survey by Franklin Templeton. Perception and reality can be miles apart.

38. As Nate Silver writes, “When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.” The biggest risk is always something that no one is talking about, thinking about, or preparing for. That’s what makes it risky.

39. The next recession is never like the last one.

40. Since 1871, the market has spent 40% of all years either rising or falling more than 20%. Roaring booms and crushing busts are perfectly normal.

41. As the saying goes, “Save a little bit of money each month, and at the end of the year you’ll be surprised at how little you still have.”

42. John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “It is safer to be a speculator than an investor in the sense that a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.”

44. Our memories of financial history seem to extend about a decade back. “Time heals all wounds,” the saying goes. It also erases many important lessons.

45. You are under no obligation to read or watch financial news. If you do, you are under no obligation to take any of it seriously.

46. The most boring companies — toothpaste, food, bolts — can make some of the best long-term investments. The most innovative, some of the worst.

47. In a 2011 Gallup poll, 34% of Americans said gold was the best long-term investment, while 17% said stocks. Since then, stocks are up 87%, gold is down 35%.

48. According to economist Burton Malkiel, 57 equity mutual funds underperformed the S&P 500 from 1970 to 2012. The shocking part of that statistic is that 57 funds could stay in business for four decades while posting poor returns. Hope often triumphs over reality.

49. Most economic news that we think is important doesn’t matter in the long run. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic once wrote, “I’ve written hundreds of articles about the economy in the last two years. But I think I can reduce those thousands of words to one sentence. Things got better, slowly.”

50. A broad index of U.S. stocks increased 2,000-fold between 1928 and 2013, but lost at least 20% of its value 20 times during that period. People would be less scared of volatility if they knew how common it was.

51. The “evidence is unequivocal,” Daniel Kahneman writes, “there’s a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.”

52. There is a strong correlation between knowledge and humility. The best investors realize how little they know.

53. Not a single person in the world knows what the market will do in the short run.

54. Most people would be better off if they stopped obsessing about Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the president, and focused on their own financial mismanagement.

55. In hindsight, everyone saw the financial crisis coming. In reality, it was a fringe view before mid-2007. The next crisis will be the same (they all work like that).

56. There were 272 automobile companies in 1909. Through consolidation and failure, three emerged on top, two of which went bankrupt. Spotting a promising trend and a winning investment are two different things.

57. The more someone is on TV, the less likely his or her predictions are to come true. (University of California, Berkeley psychologist Phil Tetlock has data on this).

58. Maggie Mahar once wrote that “men resist randomness, markets resist prophecy.” Those six words explain most people’s bad experiences in the stock market.

59. “We’re all just guessing, but some of us have fancier math,” writes Josh Brown.

60. When you think you have a great idea, go out of your way to talk with someone who disagrees with it. At worst, you continue to disagree with them. More often, you’ll gain valuable perspective. Fight confirmation bias like the plague.

61. In 1923, nine of the most successful U.S. businessmen met in Chicago. Josh Brown writes:

Within 25 years, all of these great men had met a horrific end to their careers or their lives:

The president of the largest steel company, Charles Schwab, died a bankrupt man; the president of the largest utility company, Samuel Insull, died penniless; the president of the largest gas company, Howard Hobson, suffered a mental breakdown, ending up in an insane asylum; the president of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Whitney, had just been released from prison; the bank president, Leon Fraser, had taken his own life; the wheat speculator, Arthur Cutten, died penniless; the head of the world’s greatest monopoly, Ivar Krueger the ‘match king’ also had taken his life; and the member of President Harding’s cabinet, Albert Fall, had just been given a pardon from prison so that he could die at home.

62. Try to learn as many investing mistakes as possible vicariously through others. Other people have made every mistake in the book. You can learn more from studying the investing failures than the investing greats.

63. Bill Bonner says there are two ways to think about what money buys. There’s the standard of living, which can be measured in dollars, and there’s the quality of your life, which can’t be measured at all.

64. If you’re going to try to predict the future — whether it’s where the market is heading, or what the economy is going to do, or whether you’ll be promoted — think in terms of probabilities, not certainties. Death and taxes, as they say, are the only exceptions to this rule.

65. Focus on not getting beat by the market before you think about trying to beat it.

66.Polls show Americans for the last 25 years have said the economy is in a state of decline. Pessimism in the face of advancement is the norm.

67. Finance would be better if it was taught by the psychology and history departments at universities.

68. According to economist Tim Duy, “As long as people have babies, capital depreciates, technology evolves, and tastes and preferences change, there is a powerful underlying impetus for growth that is almost certain to reveal itself in any reasonably well-managed economy.”

69. Study successful investors, and you’ll notice a common denominator: they are masters of psychology. They can’t control the market, but they have complete control over the gray matter between their ears.

70. In finance textbooks, “risk” is defined as short-term volatility. In the real world, risk is earning low returns, which is often caused by trying to avoid short-term volatility.

71. Remember what Nassim Taleb says about randomness in markets: “If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull — you don’t even know how many sides the dice have!”

72. The S&P 500 gained 27% in 1998. But just five stocks — Dell, Lucent, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Wal-Mart — accounted for more than half the gain. There can be huge concentration even in a diverse portfolio.

73. The odds that at least one well-known company is insolvent and hiding behind fraudulent accounting are pretty high.

74. The book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? was written in 1940, and most people still haven’t figured out that brokers don’t have their best interest at heart.

75. Cognitive psychologists have a theory called “backfiring.” When presented with information that goes against your viewpoints, you not only reject challengers, but double down on your view. Voters often view the candidate they support more favorably after the candidate is attacked by the other party. In investing, shareholders of companies facing heavy criticism often become die-hard supporters for reasons totally unrelated to the company’s performance.

76. “In the financial world, good ideas become bad ideas through a competitive process of ‘can you top this?'” Jim Grant once said. A smart investment leveraged up with debt becomes a bad investment very quickly.

77. Remember what Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel says: “You have never lost money in stocks over any 20-year period, but you have wiped out half your portfolio in bonds [after inflation]. So which is the riskier asset?”

78. Warren Buffett’s best returns were achieved when markets were much less competitive. It’s doubtful anyone will ever match his 50-year record.

79. Twenty-five hedge fund managers took home $21.2 billion in 2013 for delivering an average performance of 9.1%, versus the 32.4% you could have made in an index fund. It’s a great business to work in — not so much to invest in.

80. The United States is the only major economy in which the working-age population is growing at a reasonable rate. This might be the most important economic variable of the next half-century.

81. Most investors have no idea how they actually perform. Markus Glaser and Martin Weber of the University of Mannheim asked investors how they thought they did in the market, and then looked at their brokerage statements. “The correlation between self ratings and actual performance is not distinguishable from zero,” they concluded.

82. Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says that “virtually everything I taught” in economics was called into question by the financial crisis.

83. Asked about the economy’s performance after the financial crisis, Charlie Munger said, “If you’re not confused, I don’t think you understand.”

84. There is virtually no correlation between what the economy is doing and stock market returns. According to Vanguard, rainfall is actually a better predictor of future stock returns than GDP growth. (Both explain slightly more than nothing.)

85. You can control your portfolio allocation, your own education, who you listen to, what you read, what evidence you pay attention to, and how you respond to certain events. You cannot control what the Fed does, laws Congress sets, the next jobs report, or whether a company will beat earnings estimates. Focus on the former; try to ignore the latter.

86. Companies that focus on their stock price will eventually lose their customers. Companies that focus on their customers will eventually boost their stock price. This is simple, but forgotten by countless managers.

87. Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort looked at analysts’ predictions of interest rates, and compared that with what interest rates actually did in hindsight. It found an almost perfect lag. “Analysts are terribly good at telling us what has just happened but of little use in telling us what is going to happen in the future,” the bank wrote. It’s common to confuse the rearview mirror for the windshield.

88. Success is a lousy teacher,” Bill Gates once said. “It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

89. Investor Seth Klarman says, “Macro worries are like sports talk radio. Everyone has a good opinion which probably means that none of them are good.”

90. Several academic studies have shown that those who trade the most earn the lowest returns. Remember Pascal’s wisdom: “All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

91. The best company in the world run by the smartest management can be a terrible investment if purchased at the wrong price.

92. There will be seven to 10 recessions over the next 50 years. Don’t act surprised when they come.

93. No investment points are awarded for difficulty or complexity. Simple strategies can lead to outstanding returns.

94. The president has much less influence over the economy than people think.

96. For many, a house is a large liability masquerading as a safe asset.

97. The single best three-year period to own stocks was during the Great Depression. Not far behind was the three-year period starting in 2009, when the economy struggled in utter ruin. The biggest returns begin when most people think the biggest losses are inevitable.

98. Remember what Buffett says about progress: “First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.”

99. And what Mark Twain says about truth: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is putting on its shoes.”

100. And what Marty Whitman says about information: “Rarely do more than three or four variables really count. Everything else is noise.”

101. Among Americans aged 18 to 64, the average number of doctor visits decreased from 4.8 in 2001 to 3.9 in 2010. This is partly because of the weak economy, and partly because of the growing cost of medicine, but it has an important takeaway: You can never extrapolate behavior — even for something as vital as seeing a doctor — indefinitely. Behaviors change.

102. Since last July, elderly Chinese can sue their children who don’t visit often enough, according to Bloomberg. Dealing with an aging population calls for drastic measures.

103. Someone once asked Warren Buffett how to become a better investor. He pointed to a stack of annual reports. “Read 500 pages like this every day,” he said. “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

104. If Americans had as many babies from 2007 to 2014 as they did from 2000 to 2007, there would be 2.3 million more kids today. That will affect the economy for decades to come.

105. The Congressional Budget Office’s 2003 prediction of federal debt in the year 2013 was off by $10 trillion. Forecasting is hard. But we still line up for it.

106. According to TheWall Street Journal, in 2010, “for every 1% decrease in shareholder return, the average CEO was paid 0.02% more.”

107. Since 1994, stock market returns are flat if the three days before the Federal Reserve announces interest rate policy are removed, according to a study by the Federal Reserve.

108. In 1989, the CEOs of the seven largest U.S. banks earned an average of 100 times what a typical household made. By 2007, more than 500 times. By 2008, several of those banks no longer existed.

109. Two things make an economy grow: population growth and productivity growth. Everything else is a function of one of those two drivers.

110. The single most important investment question you need to ask yourself is, “How long am I investing for?” How you answer it can change your perspective on everything.

111. “Do nothing” are the two most powerful — and underused — words in investing. The urge to act has transferred an inconceivable amount of wealth from investors to brokers.

112. Apple increased more than 6,000% from 2002 to 2012, but declined on 48% of all trading days. It is never a straight path up.

114. Dan Gardner writes, “No one can foresee the consequences of trivia and accident, and for that reason alone, the future will forever be filled with surprises.”

115. I once asked Daniel Kahneman about a key to making better decisions. “You should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are,” he said. Try this before making your next investment decision.

116. No one on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans can be described as a “perma-bear.” A natural sense of optimism not only healthy, but vital.

117. Economist Alfred Cowles dug through forecasts a popular analyst who “had gained a reputation for successful forecasting” made in The Wall Street Journal in the early 1900s. Among 90 predictions made over a 30-year period, exactly 45 were right and 45 were wrong. This is more common than you think.

118. Since 1900, the S&P 500 has returned about 6.5% per year, but the average difference between any year’s highest close and lowest close is 23%. Remember this the next time someone tries to explain why the market is up or down by a few percentage points. They are basically trying to explain why summer came after spring.

119. How long you stay invested for will likely be the single most important factor determining how well you do at investing.

120. A money manager’s amount of experience doesn’t tell you much. You can underperform the market for an entire career. Many have.

121. A hedge fund once described its edge by stating, “We don’t own one Apple share. Every hedge fund owns Apple.” This type of simple, contrarian thinking is worth its weight in gold in investing.

122. Take two investors. One is an MIT rocket scientist who aced his SATs and can recite pi out to 50 decimal places. He trades several times a week, tapping his intellect in an attempt to outsmart the market by jumping in and out when he’s determined it’s right. The other is a country bumpkin who didn’t attend college. He saves and invests every month in a low-cost index fund come hell or high water. He doesn’t care about beating the market. He just wants it to be his faithful companion. Who’s going to do better in the long run? I’d bet on the latter all day long. “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with a 130 IQ,” Warren Buffett says. Successful investors know their limitations, keep cool, and act with discipline. You can’t measure that.

Why Index Funds Are Like Cheap TVs at Walmart

You can get a great deal on exchange-traded funds tracking large stock indexes. But watch out for the extra spending that can pile up.

Every industry has its loss leaders, and the investment world is no different. The theory is that you will go to the store for the $12 turkey and stick around to buy dressing, cranberries, juice, pies and two kinds of potatoes.

In the investment world, the role of the cheap turkey is played by broad stock index exchange traded funds. While investment firms say they make money on even low-fee funds, their profit margins on these products have been narrowing.

There’s been a bidding war among issuers of exchange traded funds that mimic large stock indexes like the Standard & Poor’s 500 or the Wilshire 5000 stock index. Companies including Blackrock, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab have been competing to offer investors the lowest cost shares possible on these products. Right now, Schwab — which will begin offering pre-mixed portfolios of ultra-low-cost ETFs early in 2015 — is winning.

Their theory? You’ll come in the door for the index ETF and stay for the more expensive funds, the alternative investments, the retirement advice.

“We believe we will keep that client for a long time,” said John Sturiale, senior vice president of product management for Charles Schwab Investment Management.

Investors, of course, are free to come in and buy the cheap TV and nothing more. Here are some points to consider if you want to squeeze the most out of low-cost exchange traded funds.

A few points don’t matter, but a lot of points do.

“Over the long term, cost is one of the biggest determinants of portfolio performance,” said Michael Rawson, a Morningstar analyst.

If you have a TD Ameritrade brokerage account, you can buy the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF for no cost beyond annual expenses of 0.05% of your assets in the fund. At Schwab, you can buy the Schwab U.S. Broad Market ETF for an annual expense of 0.04%. That 0.01 percentage point difference is negligible.

But compare that low-cost index fund with an actively managed fund carrying 1.3% in expenses. Invest $50,000 at the long-term stock market average return of 10% and you’ll end up with $859,477 after 30 years of having that 0.05% deducted annually. Pay 1.3% a year in expenses instead (not unusual for a high-profile actively managed mutual fund) and you’ll end up with $589,203. You’ll have given up $270,274 in fees, according to calculations performed at Buyupside.com.

Don’t pay for advice you don’t need.

The latest trend in investment advice is to charge clients roughly 1% of all of their assets to come up with a broad and diversified portfolio — with index funds at their core. Why not just buy your own core of index funds and exchange traded funds directly, and then get advice on the trickier parts of your portfolio? Or pay an adviser a onetime fee to develop a mostly index portfolio that you can buy on your own?

You won’t give up performance.

High-priced actively managed large stock funds as a group do not typically beat their indexes over time. Even those star managers who do outperform almost never do so year after year after year.

Build a broad portfolio.

Not every category of investment lends itself to low-cost indexing. You may do better with a seasoned stock picker if you’re taking aim at small-growth stocks, for example. But you can make the core of your plan a diversified and cheap portfolio of ETFs at any of the aforementioned companies, and save your fees for those extras that will really add value — the gravy, if you will.

If You Only Have One Investment, This Is the One You Need

Q: Which is a better long-term investment — a Nasdaq index fund or an index fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500? — James

A: A Nasdaq fund could “play a supporting role in a diversified portfolio,” says Leslie Thompson, a financial adviser and principal at Spectrum Management Group in Indianapolis. But if you’re going to pick just one index fund for the core part of your portfolio, you’re better off buying a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500,” she says.

Why?

Before getting into the details, let’s start with the basics.

Rather than picking and choosing “the best” securities to own, index fund simply buy and hold all the securities in a given market. By avoiding the stock selection process, index funds give you broad-based market exposure while being able to charge low expenses, which is a good thing.

The downside of this approach, of course, is that you won’t ever “beat the market” or finish at the top using this strategy. In fact, by owning all the stocks in a market, you will by definition get average market returns. However, this also means you will never badly lag the market either.

If you opt for this strategy, the market you choose to index is a critical decision.

The S&P 500 is considered the broadest of the best-known U.S. stock indexes.

The S&P 500 tracks the 500 largest, most liquid stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq — and across a spectrum of industries. “For a long-term core holding, the S&P 500 better represents the economic environment providing more diversified exposures to all sectors of the U.S.,” Thompson says.

By contrast, the most popular Nasdaq index, the Nasdaq 100, tracks about 100 of the largest non-financial companies that are listed on the Nasdaq. It’s considerably less diverse, with technology companies accounting for about 60% of its weighting, says Thompson. It’s also extremely top heavy. “Just two companies, Apple and Microsoft, make up 23% of the index,” says Thompson. The top 10 stocks, meanwhile, account for about half of the entire index versus less than 20% for the S&P 500.

This tech focus hasn’t been such a bad thing over the last decade, when it comes to performance. The USAA Nasdaq Index 100 mutual fund is up an average of 10.6% a year over the last 10 years, nearly three percentage points a year more than the Vanguard 500 Index fund.

The tradeoff: potentially more volatility.

You’ll recall that when the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, Nasdaq stocks took a much bigger hit than the S&P 500. The downside for the Nasdaq 100 hasn’t been as extreme over the last decade, says Thompson, but this isn’t the norm. Keep in mind too that the Nasdaq composite index has yet to surpass its all-time peak of more than 5,000 which it reached in 2000.

The index’s strong performance of late, moreover, has been the result of outsize results from just a handful of companies. (You can probably guess which ones.) If and when these stocks tumble, so too will the index.

Badly designed 401(k) plans are a key reason Americans are headed towards a retirement crisis, a new book explains. Here are three moves that can help.

Every week seems to bring a new study with more scary data about the Americans’ looming retirement crisis—and it’s all too easy to tune out. Don’t. As a sobering new book, Falling Short, explains, the crisis is real and getting worse. And if you want to preserve your chances of a comfortable retirement, it’s time to take action.

One of the most critical problems is the flawed 401(k) plan, which is failing workers just as they need more help than ever. “The dream of the 401(k) has not matched the reality,” says co-author Charles Ellis. “It’s turned out to be a bad idea to ask people to become investing experts—most aren’t, and they don’t want to be.”

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When it comes to money management, Ellis has plenty of perspective on what works and what doesn’t. Now 77, he wrote the investing classic Winning the Loser’s Game and founded the well-known financial consulting firm Greenwich Associates. His co-authors are Alicia Munnell, a prominent retirement expert who heads the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, and Andrew Eschtruth, the center’s associate director.

What’s wrong with the 401(k)? For basic behavioral reasons, workers consistently fail to take full advantage of their plans. Most enroll, or are auto-enrolled, at a low initial savings rate, often just 3% of pay— and they stay at that level, since few plans automatically increase workers’ contributions. Many employees borrow money from their plans, or simply cash out when they change jobs, which further erodes their retirement security. Even if investors are up to the task of money management, their 401(k)s may hamper their efforts. Many plans have limited investing menus, few index funds, and all too often saddle workers with high costs.

When you add it up, investor mismanagement, along with 401(k) design and implementation flaws, have cost Americans a big chunk of their retirement savings, according to a recent Center for Retirement Research study. Among working households headed by a 55- to 64-year-old, the median retirement savings—both 401(k)s and IRAs—is just $100,000. By contrast, if 401(k)s worked well, the median amount would have been $373,000, or $273,000 more. As things stand now, half of Americans are at risk of not being able to maintain their standard of living in retirement, according to the center’s research.

Can the 401(k) be fixed? Yes, the authors say, if employers adopt reforms such as auto enrollment, a higher automatic contribution rate, and the use of low-cost index funds. But even those changes won’t end the retirement crisis—after all, only half of private sector workers have an employer-sponsored retirement plan. Moreover, Americans face other economic challenges, including funding Social Security, increased longevity, and rising health care costs.

To address these problems, authors discuss possible policy changes, such as automatic IRAs for small businesses and proposals for a new national retirement plan. Still, major reforms are unlikely to happen soon. Meanwhile, there’s a lot you can do now to improve your odds of a comfortable retirement. The authors highlight these three moves to get you started:

Aim to save 14%: The best way to ensure that you actually save is to make the process automatic. That’s why few people consistently put away money without help from a company retirement plan. If you save 14% of your income each year, starting at age 35, you can expect to retire comfortably at age 67, the authors’ research shows. Start saving at age 25, and put away 12%, and you may be able to retire at 65. If you get a 401(k) matching contribution, that can help your reach your goal.

Choose low-cost index funds. One of the smartest ways to pump up your savings is to lower your investment fees—after all, each dollar you pay in costs reduces your return. Opt for index funds and ETFs, which typically charge just 0.2% or less. By contrast, actively managed stock funds often cost 1.4% or more, and odds are, they will lag their benchmarks.

Adjust your goals to match reality. You 401(k) account isn’t something you can set and forget. Make sure you’re saving enough, and that your investments still match your risk tolerance and goals—a lot can change in your life over two or more decades. The good news is that you can find plenty of free onlinecalculators, both inside and outside your plan, to help you stay on course.

If you’re behind in your savings, consider working a few years longer if you can. By delaying retirement, you give yourself the opportunity to save more, and your portfolio has more time to grow. Just as important, each year that you defer your Social Security claim between the ages of 62 and 70 will boost the size of your benefit by 8% a year. “You get 76% more at age 70 than you will at age 62,” says Ellis. If working till 70 isn’t your idea of an dream retirement, then you have plenty of incentive to save even more now.